The Moda Cutting Table

Adjusting Patterns for Pre-Cuts

Did you know that Moda Fabrics offers a wide range of free patterns? You can find them {here} on the Moda Fabrics/United Notions website. Today Oda May will show you how to take a pattern and make adjustments so you can use pre-cuts.

Hello, Bake Shop readers! I just adore Moda’s new Civil War Jubilee pattern and wanted to adapt it for pre-cuts so all of you pre-cut lovers can enjoy it, too. I’m going to share my simple method so that you can follow similar steps to adapt other patterns for use with pre-cuts.

Civil War Jubilee is a good pattern to start with because many of the pieces used are cut to 2.5″ wide, perfect for a jelly roll! And that’s my first tip – start with a pattern that uses pieces that are the same size as a pre-cut. To refresh your memory on pre-cut sizes, visit the {Bakery} page.

Let’s figure out how many jelly rolls to use. To do this for the Civil War Jubilee pattern, I added up the length of the cuts used for each block. For example, the pattern specifies:

Each block uses the same two cuts (twice): 2.5″ x 12.5″ and 2.5″ x 4.5″ for a total length of 34″. That means we can cut from one jelly roll strip for each block and still have 8 inches of usable fabric left. There are 40 jelly rolls strips per package so we can make 40 blocks with one jelly roll. The pattern is a 5 x 9 block layout with a total of 45 blocks. Our pre-cut version will be a 5 x 8 layout.

Now that we now how many jelly rolls, we will use the same yardage cuts called for in the pattern, but we’ll have a bit more left over for the scrap bin.You will also need to recalculate your borders and bindings, but there are lots of free calculators to help you with that step.

Which other Moda patterns would you like to see adapted for pre-cuts? Let me know in the comments.